Children of the Stars

by Mario Escobar

The boys froze, but before Marcel could fire at them, Jacob grabbed his arm.

  “Leave them alone.”

  Marcel frowned. He could not understand this rich city boy. The whole world knew the Germans were the enemy.

  “They’re kids just like us. The war is between adults,” Jacob said.

  The German boys threw down their slingshots in surrender. They looked truly frightened. Their parents had warned them about lurking dangers, but they had run off at a moment when no one was looking in order to explore the old mill.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Jacob said in German.

  Their eyes widened in disbelief.

  Marcel’s did too. “You speak German?” He was incredulous.

  “Yeah,” was all the explanation Jacob gave.

  “We didn’t mean to hurt you,” the older boy said to Jacob.

  “You can go, and don’t forget your slingshots.”

  “Thanks,” the boys said in unison. But before leaving they turned back and asked, “Do you want to play?”

  The four boys looked at one another. It was one thing to not attack the Germans, but it was another thing altogether to play with them. Moses finally stepped forward and said, “Sure, we can play, but we should go outside. It’s kind of dangerous in this millhouse. Paul just fell.”

  The Germans nodded. They knew French, so games with their new playmates would come easy.

  Sometime later, the church bells rang out loudly, and Paul reminded them to go home for supper.

  “Will you be back here tomorrow?” one of the German boys asked.

  “I’m not sure. We’ve got some things to do,” Jacob answered.

  “How do you know German?” the smaller boy asked.

  “I learned it in school.” Jacob found a lie more prudent than the truth.

  “You sound German. You don’t have an accent. So we’ll try to come back tomorrow at the same time, and I’ll bring a ball,” said the older boy, before turning and running off toward the commander’s residence.

  Jacob, Moses, Paul, and Marcel ran back toward the Bonnay house. As they neared the plaza, Jacob could not stop berating himself for his critical error. Surely the boys would tell their parents they had met a boy who spoke German. He did not know what had made him do it, but it was too late now. He would have to warn Bonnay of the risk they were now running.

  Once home, they washed up and waited impatiently for supper. Jacob could hardly eat, however. When Bonnay went out to the patio to smoke his pipe, Jacob followed him.

  “Mr. Bonnay, may I speak with you?”

  The man grunted and then patted the stair with his hand for the boy to sit. “What is it, my boy? I hope you haven’t gotten into trouble on your first day.”

  “I’m afraid I have. We ran into two German boys near the river. Marcel threatened them with his slingshot . . .”

  “Well done. My Marcel doesn’t put up with these blasted Deutsch.” Bonnay smiled proudly.

  “Yes, but I stopped him, and I spoke to them in German to calm everything down.”

  “You did what?” he said, taking his pipe out and turning toward the boy.

  “I spoke to them in German.”

  “To the children of the commander and the captain of the garrison? Have you lost your mind?”

  Bonnay scratched at his scalp. His hair badly needed to be cut. The gray was steadily encroaching upon his bushy brown head.

  “I’m sorry,” Jacob said.

  “Well, there’s no way around it. We’ll all have to leave tonight. My mother can stay. She’s in no danger. We’ll take my coal truck and take a shortcut over the lines. It’s by cattle trail . . .”

  “I’m really sorry,” Jacob repeated, on the verge of tears. He hated himself for putting this family at risk.

  “Calm down, lad. Many times I’ve thought about crossing over. The Nazis are stealing coal from me every day, and I’ve thought one too many times about shooting the whole lot of them. The boys are the only reason I haven’t done it yet. I’ve got family in Roanne. From there you can go to Lyon. Then it’s not far to Valence, just over sixty miles.”

  Bonnay stood up. He seemed even taller and stronger than the first time Jacob saw him.

  “Marcel, Paul, come!” he called as he entered the house. He put out his pipe and emptied it in the kitchen.

  “What is it, Father?” Marcel asked.

  “We’re going to Roanne tonight to see our cousins. It’s been a long time since we visited Uncle Fabien.”

  Marcel and Paul stared at him, puzzled. Since their mother’s death two years ago, they had never left home.

  “We’re leaving in the middle of the night?” Marcel asked, connecting the dots. “Is it because of those German boys?” Then he grabbed Jacob’s collar. “You little Jews, you—”

  Bonnay’s great hand pushed Marcel, and he fell flat on his back. “You will never speak like that again, do you hear me? In our family, there are no Jews or Christians. We’re socialists, and all people are our brothers and sisters.” He pointed at the boy with his pipe to mark the seriousness of his words.

  Bonnay went upstairs and spoke briefly with his mother. After filling two small suitcases, he lifted a wooden plank and retrieved his savings. It was not much, but it would be enough to start a new life somewhere else. For years, he and his wife had scrimped to save enough to send their boys to good schools—but none of that mattered now. What chances did a collier’s sons have in a world ruled by Nazi swine? Such thoughts ran through his mind as he put on his coat and secured the money in a secret pocket in his pants.

  The boys were waiting downstairs. They were dressed, including shoes, and holding their jackets. Jacob had gotten his bookbag from the room.

  “I won’t miss these old walls too much. We’ve been very happy in this house, for sure, but also rather unlucky. Your poor mother worked herself to the bone trying to turn this pigsty into a home, but she’s not here anymore.” Bonnay’s eyes focused on something far away, but only for a moment. Then he picked up the suitcases again.

  The truck was parked at the back, and not a soul walked the streets. The mandatory curfew forbade the townspeople from venturing out at night. They had to get out of the city as soon as they could. And no one knew the country roads like a coal man.

  All five of them piled into the cab. The two younger boys sat by Bonnay, and the older boys beside them. It took them a while to get settled, then Bonnay turned the ignition. The vehicle roared in the surrounding silence, and Bonnay looked around through the dirty windows nervously. None of the neighbors were looking out their windows. He eased the car into gear and started out slow, leaving the plaza and heading for the road that ran along the river. If they could just get a few miles down, the Germans would have no way of finding them. The night was so clear he could drive without the headlights.

  He managed to sneak through the narrow streets of Bourges, then take a smaller road that ran along some cornfields. There he sped up to get away from occupied France and to the made-up border that turned half of the French into Hitler’s slaves and the other half into his bootlicking subjects.

  The truck sped through the prairies and cornfields. As soon as they got to the unoccupied zone, it would be less dangerous. He had their papers in order and could say he was taking his nephews back home after a visit.

  As the truck drove away, a group of Germans advanced lightly toward the church of Saint-Pierre. A sergeant knocked at the Bonnay home. It took the elderly Mrs. Bonnay some time to put on her robe and make her way down the steep stairs and through the hallway. When she opened the door, the Germans pushed her aside and began searching the house. Smarting, the woman went to the small living room and sat down to wait.

  The sergeant entered and in basic French asked, “Where are the children?”

  “What children?” she asked quietly. She was calm. At her age, death was more a gift than a threat.

  “The one who speaks German.”

  “My grandchildren don’
t speak German. A week ago they went to see their cousins in Orleans.” This kind of lying, anything to throw them off a scent, came easy to her.

  “You’re lying. They were playing today down by the river.” The sergeant grabbed the front of her gown.

  “I’m not afraid of you. I’m just an old woman,” she said.

  The sergeant dropped her. They were wasting their time. He considered sending a search party, but it was late, they had not eaten, and this whole row was over some children. He would look for them tomorrow. The little fish always slip through the net, he thought, then pushed the grandmother down hard for good measure.

  The soldiers left the house in disarray, and the grandmother listened to their boots on the stone pavement of the plaza until they faded away on the main road. She got to her feet slowly, closed the front door, and went to her room. She prayed for her son and grandchildren. She knew the cost of war—her uncle in the war with Prussia, one son in the Great War—and she desperately hoped God would spare her one remaining son. She had little left to give the world. It had been a difficult life: poverty, hunger, death, and sadness were etched into her face and looked out through her downcast, cataract-clouded eyes. Yet for some reason just then she had the fleeting sensation of the first dance she shared with the man who became her husband. The vibrancy and hope of youth still nested in her worn-out heart. She understood immortality to be becoming young again, shaking off the smothering mantle of age, as one shakes off dirty, threadbare clothes, and running toward all those who had gone before her. She closed her eyes and saw her husband’s smile, her mother’s freckled face, the grin of her dead son, the blundering frame of her uncle. She longed for the paradise of the gone generations, where time made no difference and tears did not exist.

  Under the star-studded night sky in France, at some point in the middle of the mountains, the world still felt like a happy place, where joy and peace orchestrated the lives of the inhabitants. It was a secret place, surrounded by dense forests and green meadows, where the monster of war seemingly had not yet arrived.

  Part 2

  Chapter 13

  Bourges

  July 23, 1942

  The clickety-clack of the truck lulled the boys to sleep, and Bonnay fought hard to stay awake at the wheel. Since the beginning of the war, and especially since his wife’s death, the care of the family fell almost entirely on his shoulders. His mother helped as she could, but her age limited her. The children were well behaved, and he knew he was lucky in that regard. Paul was a tenderheart with an eternal smile that brightened up their dull lives and breathed hope back into them. He was so much like his mother, Marguerite. Both of them could fill a room with their joyful presence. For years, Bonnay and his wife had fostered big dreams in their hearts, but death was a rude awakening. The hopes of commoners are abruptly cut off when the current of history changes direction and drags them where they could never have dreamed of going.

  Love had found them when they were still young enough to have one foot in the fairytale land of innocence. The children of manual laborers were never allowed to draw out the season of childhood, but when the young Bonnay would leave his father’s coal yard, he would dash to Marguerite’s school. They would run through the city to the cathedral and play in the yard around the huge building, chasing each other up and down the stairs before sharing an ice-cream cone in the park. When it rained, they would walk around inside the cathedral, stealing glances at each other as they studied the enchanting stained-glass windows that turned all the light into magic rainbows. Before they were eighteen, they got married in the chapel at Saint-Pierre. It was the only time in his life that Bonnay had put on a suit, and it was the last time he attended a service. He was an atheist and Marguerite, Catholic, but Bonnay respected that she wanted them to be married by the Church.

  After Marcel arrived, they started saving. They wanted their son to become a doctor, or maybe an architect, but none of that mattered anymore.

  Sometimes life shrinks and plans fall apart. Making it from one day to the next is hard enough, and feeding four mouths is a miracle.

  The sun started to light up the yellowed fields around them. Spring had brought copious rains after a bitterly cold winter, and now the raging heat seemed intent on burning up the life that had worked so hard to be reborn.

  Paul turned to his father and gifted him with Marguerite’s smile. Bonnay’s heart was pierced with the knowledge that he was carrying in his beat-up truck everything he loved. He felt like the richest man on earth. Everything he needed fit into two suitcases, because those two boys were his whole world. Being a father meant renouncing his own hopes and putting everything he had into the dreams of his children.

  “Good morning, Paul.”

  “Good morning, Father,” Paul said, rubbing his eyes.

  “Are you hungry?” Bonnay dug with one hand into a bag behind his seat.

  “I’m starving! I could eat a horse,” the boy answered with another smile.

  Bonnay held out a chunk of bread and a piece of beef sausage, and Paul made short work of it. The smell of food woke the other boys, and they all had their breakfast. The collier enjoyed watching them eat, though he did not partake himself, not wanting their supplies to run out before they reached his brother-in-law’s home. Since Marguerite’s death, the families had not seen each other. Bonnay was not beloved by Marguerite’s family. They had always thought their daughter and sister deserved someone better. Bonnay himself felt the same; his wife had been much better than he. Still, Marguerite’s brother had always offered to help if they ever needed it. Bonnay did not like asking for favors, but the safety of his sons was more important than his pride.

  “How much farther?” Moses asked. Though he had been on the road for many days now, he was still not used to long car trips.

  “Not too far. We had to take a long detour, but we should be there by tonight. My brother-in-law has a lovely farm outside of Roanne. I don’t know how things have gone for him since the German invasion, but he’s always been a survivor.”

  Just then the truck gave a great lurch. A piece of bread jumped out of Moses’s hand as if it were alive, and the boys howled with laughter. A big hole in the road threatened to stall them, but Bonnay regained control of the truck and they continued on.

  Cropland surrounded them as far as they could see. This region was much more fertile than the fields they knew. The cities were brighter, and the people happier and more friendly the closer they traveled to the Mediterranean. Bonnay preferred the bogs and rustling branches of the thick forests in his department of Cher. He loved the wine from his region and the brilliant, flashing colors of their autumn.

  The truck spluttered its way toward the outskirts of Céron. From there, Bonnay intended to head down and enter Roanne from the north. He was not sure if gendarmes would be stationed all around, but he doubted they would come across Germans.

  For the next few hours, he avoided all towns and cities. He feared they would run out of gas, and he feared for the truck. It was sturdy enough to deliver coal all around Bourges, but Bonnay had not taken it onto a highway for years, much less the back roads they traveled, which were paved with old, uneven cobblestones or nothing at all—roads no one had tended for decades. Finally, they approached Roanne—an industrial city that produced paper and textiles and had a huge factory for tanks and Citröen cars.

  Bonnay turned down a road that ran along the Loire River and led to the farm of his brother-in-law, Fabien. As the truck chugged up the drive, Bonnay noted that things must be going very well for Fabien. Large buildings lined the drive, which ended at a beautiful, newly built villa. He parked right in front of the door, and a woman dressed in a maid’s uniform came out to greet them. She wore a white bonnet and an impeccable apron.

  “The collier,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Fabien Aline,” Bonnay answered, ignoring the scorn on the woman’s face.

  “We’ve not ordered any coal. We have
plenty left from the winter, and we do business with Mr. Darras,” she said, not letting Bonnay explain. His worn-out clothes, black nails, and rough hands were calling card enough for her.

  “No, you don’t understand,” Bonnay started, trying not to lose his patience.

  A well-dressed gentleman in a spotless white suit walked out of the house. He smoked a long, thin cigarette, and a dapper felt hat covered part of his gray hair.

  “What’s going on, Suzanne?” he asked.

  “This man is trying to sell us coal.” She waved her hand toward the truck.

  The gentleman frowned as he studied the visitors, his thin brows forming a nearly perfect golden arch. “Good heavens, it’s my brother-in-law!”

  Fabien walked forward and hugged Bonnay lightly so as not to stain his wool suit. Bonnay was overwhelmed and confused. He had never seen Fabien dressed like this. He wondered how people could change in such a short time.

  “Have you brought the boys? Alice and little Fabien will be delighted to see their cousins. It’s been over two years. I see you’re still in the family business.”

  “Yes,” Bonnay answered, “though it seems you’ve done much better for yourself than I have.”

  “Oh, the world is a farce, the human comedy and all that. Things are always changing.”

  The children got out of the truck. Marcel remembered his uncle, though the last time he had seen him, the man had been dressed in the black of mourning. He could also remember his aunt, who was younger than her husband, with blond hair and lavender blue eyes.

  “These are the boys? How they have grown!” Fabien exclaimed. But when he saw the two other boys, he turned a puzzled look to Bonnay.

  “They’re some friends of Marcel and Paul’s. We invited them to come enjoy a few days off with us,” he lied. He would explain the reason for their trip later.

  “Well, come in, come in. Clotilde is in town doing some shopping. She’s not too big a fan of the country anymore. In fact, we live in Roanne during the winter. The children are in their piano lessons, but they’ll come out to see you before long,” Fabien said, his ringed hand guiding Bonnay through the door.